Saturday, 29 April 1995

Most importantly, I haven't felt able to take a decision which - if every other middle-class parent in Islington did the same - would result in a complete polarisation of educational provision. We mustn't act in a way which will create a society our ...

This country needs all its children educated to their full potential if it is to survive in the world. This goal will not be achieved if the middle class opts out, either into private education or into the few remaining grammar schools.
The parents w...

S R Bishop, France
l YOU note that Big Mac comes to Venice ("Caf society faces inelegant fate", 23 April) as if this were the fall of civilisation. This event in fact took place when McDonald's opened up in Hampstead.
Daniel Chatterton, London N1
l P...

We all carried ID cards in the 1939 war, because we recognised the demands of national emergency, but I remember the pleasure with which we burnt them after. Today, the requirement to carry an identity card would achieve the apotheosis of the present...

The essence of the building society movement is mutuality - the society merely acting as arranger and stakeholder between lenders and borrowers. The societies are owned and controlled by the members and there is no scope for profit to third parties. ...

The new programming policy places a commitment to thoroughly researched retrospectives of classic cinema at its centre. But these take much planning: the NFT shows films that no other cinema in the UK could screen, but doing a complete retrospective ...

As head teacher of a Camberwell school, I cannot let his remark go unchallenged. My school could well be one of his local schools. As far as I know Mr Walsh and his daughter have not visited the school, and I am quite certain that if he had talked to...

In it, the phrase "desirable quality of life" means an indul-gent offspring- free existence for, apparently, self-engrossed parents.
There must, however, be thousands like us. We have three grown children who are our best friends. For me, perhaps the...

Let me tell you about my garden. I have a family of muntjacs living in it. Every single thing except daffodils and mature trees is surrounded by wire netting. (Even then they get through.) Tulips are eaten to the ground; the young growth on all my ro...

No, the thing that has annoyed me most is the excuse that it has given rugby league's parochial flat-cap tendency to get all dewy eyed about "roots" and "tradition" and "community", implying it is a Northern sport that should stay there. At least Sim...

The problem is not one of creating identification out of a sea of anonymity, but rather a degree of national standardisation out of a situation of overlapping formal identifications - driving licences, social security numbers, credit cards - where mi...

I don't think so and I'm no modern socialist nor even particularly liberal in my views. I work as a finance director for a public company and my children all go to state schools. They get an education in the widest sense, and preparation for the real...

TODAY is the feast day of Saint Adjutor, Norman nobleman who, in 1095, set off for the Holy Land with the First Crusade. Adjutor was captured by the Muslims and thrown into prison but, one night, Saint Mary Magdalene appeared to him in his cell, help...

Tory MP Winston Churchill, on the use of £12.5m of National Lottery cash to buy his grandfather's papers
Copyright is like a bishop's sexuality - a grey area.
Dr Piers Brendon, curator of the Churchill Archive at Churchill College, Cambridge
I am sor...

But at least these arguments are about how the event should be marked rather than what it is. For one country the debate is different. For Germany, the question is not so much how to celebrate as what to celebrate: the country is in the paradoxical p...

MOST dual-purpose words, such as wicked, depend for their meaning on who happens to be using them: bad when spoken by parsons, good when spoken by pagan teenagers, say. is different. It more often does a quick-change act by going into another part of...

Those are probably the bad reasons. The good reason is that an editorial is, or should be, the voice of the newspaper. This is a hackneyed phrase and also, in an era when newspapers are seen increasingly as "products" that need to be "marketed", an o...

I regard this as an important breakthrough in personal time-scheduling and have Julian Barnes to thank. I had been trying to give up contemporary fiction for years. My bookshelves creak under a weight of unread classics. Would I ever discover how the...

More than 30 years ago, when Lord Wilson made the speech on science and socialism at the Scarborough conference, nationalisation was still a matter of controversy. It was used as a talisman of whether you were on the Left. This was doubly paradoxical...

So I am not counting down to 8 May, VE Day, but a bit further - to 5 July, the main polling day in the 1945 general election. Nobody had the faintest idea of what was about to happen, although the Daily Mirror got it right by inspired guesswork. That...

Our next dining titbit comes from Royal College Street, Camden Town, home of the Kypros restaurant, unpretentious purveyor, I'm told, of the finest Greek food in town. My attention has been drawn to the amazing similarity between Mr Kypros and his re...

I was greatly taken, too, by the snap of Young Winston printed in the newspapers this week as he posed beneath the statue of his grandparents at Chartwell, busily reading a National Trust brochure, his brow suitably furrowed. If only the photographer...

I tend to think that these white supremacists like Terreblanche, the boneheads of the BNP and Bernard Manning are all so revoltingly ugly and unpleasant that they make the best possible advertisement for mixed marriages. Would you prefer your daughte...

Why is he so annoying to people? In part, it's his pugnacity - the kind which you glimpse even in the titles of early plays of his, such as Knuckle and Slag. In part, it's the perceived gap between his private life (affluence, Hampstead home, success...

Preliminary results from our research in Sheffield show that refurbishment with high levels of insulation and efficient heating systems has eradicated fuel poverty - even among the poorest residents - and lifted many above a "basic essentials" povert...

It is astonishing that the Churchill family claims ownership of such documents, written by an employee of the state, however eminent, and even more remarkable that the Government should condone their purchase from the contributions of so many pension...

The Prime Minister could do no better than to remember the words of his Government's own environmental strategy, that "sustainable development within urban areas is closely bound up with the quality of urban life". In a country where we are urbanisin...

But are they the right people doing the right job? When the Churchill row broke this week it became clear there was a real credibility gap between popular conceptions of what the Lottery money was going to fund and what the establishment was doing. T...

This week collective anxiety rose another few notches as it became yet more apparent that both the public and private sectors are all too likely to let us down when we need them most.
Take the state sector first. After the Second World War, successiv...

"Hurry hurry hurry while stocks last! Mountain Mac's hot cakes are moving as fast as The Big One, The Black One, The Fat One and The Other One!"
This, you may remember, was a collection of my Independent pieces, published in 1992 by Michael O'Mara Bo...

There is one simple reason for this: 1989. This was the year of the end of Eastern Europe, the conclusion of the Cold War and the effective collapse of Communism. It was the year that brought the 20th century to a premature close. The Vietnam war was...

There is a view in the industry that British slaughterhouse closures are not due to Government regulation. The Meat and Livestock Commission has published a report demonstrating that the number of slaughterhouses has been falling for over 20 years du...

It is impracticable for employees in the Royal Household to be charged market rents. Their salaries are paid from the public purse at public sector rates and would have to be raised to take account of the rent increase. Staff are employed on merit, a...

In a photograph often reproduced in books about the Gershwin brothers, George and Ira are to be seen on the set of the Astaire and Rogers film Shall We Dance (1937) with Fred and Ginger, in whose left hand a cigarette can clearly be seen. Another Hol...

I rarely attend football matches and never go to the opera, but I do not begrudge those institutions their lottery grants. I am appalled that, just as common-sense politics seemed finally to be taking root, Labour and Liberal reaction has been so phi...

The reality is that we have had 29 government inner-city schemes in the past 16 years, but all have resulted in an inner-city strategy that is neither coherent or constructive.
Mr Major has forgotten that, only a few months ago, this Government's own...

By the time the train got to Victoria I had decided that despair was not enough. I had better do something, write something to avoid this fate again. I read all the scores of analyses on Major's victory. As I did, an encounter in the Tory marginal of...

Insecurity at work is now epidemic. Too many people feel that each pay cheque might be their last - Harriet Harman, shadow employment secretary.
I would like to challenge Mike Tyson - that is how I feel - Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, 76...

Much has been made of so-called problem council estates, but now housing associations are being forced by current government policy into a similar situation. Cuts in subsidy mean increased reliance on private investment, the cost of which is passed o...